"Gordon R. Dickson - The Pritcher Mass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

her face had no color at all now. Her eyes were open again,
staring at the dead man.
"He'll have planted something else up ahead to break us
open—I know he'll have," she said.
Chaz looked away from her uncomfortably. He could not
blame anyone for fearing the rot. A single spore could slip
through the smallest crack in a sealed environment, be
inhaled and take root in human lungs, to grow and spread
there until the one who had inhaled it died of asphyxiation.
But to see someone living in a constant, morbid fear of it was
something that seemed to reach inside him, take hold of a
handful of his guts and twist them.
It was the sort of emotional self-torture in which his
Neopuritanic aunt and cousins indulged. It had always
sickened him to see them slaves to such a fear, and filled him
with a terrible fury against the thing that had made slaves of
them. To a certain extent, he felt the same way about all
people with whom he shared this present poisoned and
bottled-up world. The two conflicting reactions had made
him a loner—as friendless and self-isolated as a man could be
under conditions in which people were physically penned up
together most of the time, as they were on this train.
He hung in his harness, watching the roadbed gravel
alongside the train start to blur in the gathering darkness, as
the three cars picked up speed to a normal three hundred
kilometers per hour. A pair of animal eyes gleamed at him
momentarily from the gloom. Animals were generally free of
the rot; research for forty years had yet to find out why. It was
dark enough outside now for the window to show him a
shadowy image, pacing the rushing train like a transparent
ghost, of the lighted car; and himself—jumpsuited, of average
height, with the shock of straight black hair and the face that
seemed to be scowling even when it was not …
Details of what had happened were being passed back by
word of mouth through the rows of commuters ahead of him.
"The heat-monitoring screen picked him up through the
trees around the curve," the man in front of the woman next
to Chaz relayed to the two rows about them, "even before they
could see him. But on the screen he was just about the size of
a repair scooter. So they held speed, just keyed in the
computer on the cannon and waited. Sure enough, once the
comp had a clear image, it identified a saboteur, fired, and
knocked him out of the way."
He twisted his neck further back over his shoulder to look
at the row containing Chaz and the woman.
"Someone up ahead suggested we hold a small penitential
gathering for the saboteur," he said. "Anyone back here want
to join in?"
"I do," said the woman. She was one of the Neopuritans all
right. Chaz shook his head at the man, who turned his own